Anthology of American Piano Music, Vol. 3

Review: Gramophone Review: MusicWebInternational Review: PianoNews Aaron Copland 1. Down a country lane Anthony Philip Heinrich 2. The Minstrel’s March or The Road to Kentucky Percy Grainger 3. Spoon River William Mason 4. Silver Spring, Op. 6 Edward MacDowell Woodland Sketches, Op. 51 5. I. To a wild Rose 6. II. Will o’the Wisp 7. III. At and Old Trysting Place 8. IV. In Autumn 9. V. From an Indian Lodge 10. VI. To a Water Lily 11. VII. From Uncle Remus 12. VIII. A Deserted Farm 13. IX. By a Meadow Brook 14. X. Told at Sunset Arthur Farwell 15. Sourwood Mountain, Op. 78 No. 3 Leo Ornstein 16. A Morning in the Woods, SO 106 William Grant Still A Deserted Plantation 17. Spiritual 18. Young Missy 19. Dance Arthur Farwell From Mesa and Plain, Op. 20 20. Navajo War Dance 21. Pawnee Horses 22. Prairie Miniature 23. Wa-Wan Choral 24. Plantation Melody Roy Harris 25. Streets of Laredo Charles Wakefield Cadman 26. From the Land of the Sky-blue Water Walking down a country lane to the land of the sky-blue water © Thomas Nickelsen American landscapes vary widely, and so does the music that originates from them. When you start walking Down a country lane somewhere in the northeast and continue going southwest you may find quite a few of the places portrayed in music on this CD. They are spread out all over mainland USA, from New England to the Old South and from the Midwest to the West. And your travel guides, the composers, use very different means of locomotion, depending on the period when they lived and on the amount of money in their pocket. In 1817, Anthony Philip Heinrich traveled a substantial part of his Road to Kentucky from Philadelphia on foot. Having gone bankrupt twice, first as businessman and then as a music director, he composed his musical travel diary in a log-cabin near Lexington where he fell in love with the (still) untamed nature of the surrounding landscape and its Native American inhabitants who would later inspire his orchestral works and make him the early precursor of the American Indianist movement of the late 19th century. By the time when Arthur Farwell and Charles Wakefield Cadman followed his footsteps and were prominent members of the Indianist group, however, the frontier between the United States and Indian territories had moved way out west, to Mesa and Plain. Which didn’t hinder Edward MacDowell to sometimes use Native American themes, although his late cycles of characterpieces for the piano are deeply rooted in New England. It can be hypothesized that the woods of his Woodland Sketches were not very distant geographically from those where Leo Ornstein would wander, spending A Morning in the Woods, perhaps to find William Mason’s ominous Silver Spring that had been bubbling there for more than a century of oblivion. By contrast, William Grant Still, who was born in the state of Mississippi and who was to become the first widely recognized Afro-American composer, didn’t have to leave the Old South in search of A deserted plantation to get a glimpse of daily life there after the end of the Civil War. It sufficed to visit Uncle Josh, its sole occupant, ‘who delights in dreaming of the [plantation’s] past glory’. With few exceptions (Silver Spring, A Morning in the Woods, Down a Country Lane) all works recorded here are partly or entirely inspired by, or thematically based on, folklore such as American Indian themes, popular songs, poems, and dances. A collection of the poems is provided in the booklet. Many of them tell tragic stories, reaching their culmination in the sad fate of the captive maiden From the Land of the Sky-blue Water and the lonely cowboy’s premature death in The Streets of Laredo. RELEASE DATE: MAY 2018 CATALOGUE NUMBER: DACOCD 800 EAN: 5709499800003 Download BOOKLET (PDF) Related